This Severance Theory About Irving's Notebook Is Beyond Genius

The key to infiltrating Lumon’s severed floor may be hiding in plain sight on Severance. In Season 2, Episode 3, Irving showed off a notebook in which he had drawn the same picture of his lost love Burt every day since his retirement. Interestingly enough, Irving’s outie has also been painting the same picture every day after his shifts at Lumon. Now, a theory has gone viral on the show’s subreddit that claims Irving may have cracked the code on how innies and outies can communicate.

The theory states that Irving daily drawings and paintings are a way he can get certain images ingrained in his muscle memory so deeply that the other version of himself can also replicate the images. Clearly, outie Irving was desperate to tell his innie about the Optics and Design exports door, so he committed himself to painting the black hallway every day. The plan didn’t totally succeed, as Irving learned about the door through actually seeing his outie’s paintings in person during the Overtime Contingency, but it may have worked the other way around.

The revelation that innie Irving has been drawing Burt’s face every day could mean he came up with the same idea as his outie. Except instead of telling his other self about a door, he wanted his outie to know how important Burt is to him. This method could be the reason outie Irving has started to recognize outie Burt as someone significant in his life.

Adding feul to this theory is the fact that a central element of Episode 3 was outie Mark testing out experimental ways to try to communicate messages to his innie. His tactic to try to blast his retinas with short messages stamped on super-bright lights is somewhat similar to Irving’s theoretical use of trying to store information within the body.

It would make poetic sense for the key to circumventing Lumon’s grim, colorless business aesthetic to be creative expression through art. Irving, you sly fox; you may have really figured it all out.